Hixie On HTML Parsing

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Waist deep in an ongoing effort to write a spec for parsing HTML documents Ian Hickson asks offers up this Tag Soup riddle asking what should the DOM look like for the following invalid code:

<!DOCTYPE html><em><p>XY</p></em>

The answer as you’ll see in his brain dump isn’t simple nor obvious.

Now if your head isn’t spinning after reading through that you should also take the time to read through his post from a few days ago where he started his parsing related brain dump. And if it is, well, take two aspirin, but also at least take a look at the little utility he wrote and used in both these posts—Live DOM Viewer—where you can drop some markup in and instantly see the DOM tree represented.

I[ron]EEE

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Kimberly Blessing just passed me a link to the relaunched IEEE site to me. In the line of recent failed redesigns its a formal standards organization that clearly doesn’t get the standards of the web.

Some of the faults at first glance:

  • Heavy use table based layout methods with little thought towards sematics.
  • Forms that don’t reflect the use of standards to develop more accessible forms.
  • An odd use of short tags, css and other newer techniques amidst it all.

They’ve somehow managed to take every possible way to build a page and lumped them all together into some futuristic pill-form of tag soup.

I do have to give them a tiny bit of credit for not using a doctype and thus not advertising to the world that they’re shipping something that conforms to any DTD at all, but that really doesn’t account for much.

[Oh the irony! IEEE site not standards-compliant by Kimberly Blessing.]

Microformats Plugin For Textpattern v0.8 Released

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Spent some more time on hacking away at Textpattern and pnh_mf this weekend and have a new release to show for it. Aside from a few minor bug fixes I have included new admin side dialogs for building proper TXP tags. These dialogs work just like any other TXP tag helpers already in Pages and Forms editors, but are also available for the article editor.

I still have a few more items on my to do list to knock out, but the tag helper popups should make this a ton more useful—both for people who know what microformats are and those that don’t—so I wanted to make a release now.

Download the latest version.